Endangered Species (34 page)

excursion.

"Think anybody'll see it?" asked the woman.

"Not at night.  By daylight nobody'll even know it happened."

An odor, peculiar in the wilderness, assaulted Anna's nostrils .

Lighter fluid.  A gasp escaped her lungs and her heart began to pound.

Forcing again an internal stillness, she felt the panic recede to a

prickle on her scalp and a queasiness in her stomach.  With a few deep

breaths these symptoms, too, were banished.

The voices were ten feet away.  The lighter fluid was not meant for her.

She heard the avaricious crackle of flame before she saw it .

When orange splintered through the boards of the sty, Anna put her eye

to the crack.  Hanson, squatting, his back to her, had fired the pile of

marijuana plants.  The glow lit the face of the woman next to him.  His

wife, Louise; this was a family business.  Anna remembered Alice

Utterback's cynical plan of a crime ring of middle-aged ladies.

Utterback had been dead on.  No one, Anna included, would have suspected

Mrs.  Hanson of any crime more sinister than munching a few grapes

before the bunch was weighed at the local Sack & Save.  Even on a

moonlit night, in the woods, burning an illegal drug crop, Mitch's ivife

looked innocent.  She was in her fifties, slightly overweight, with

chin-length brown hair tied back with a scarf.  Big-rimmed plastic

eyeglasses dominated her face, and her hands were protected by gardening

gloves, the kind with elasticized cuffs and sprigs of little

green-and-pink flowers.

Smoke from the burning pile drifted in Anna's direction.  The light

piercing her shelter became tangible as orange fog poured in .

She pulled the neck of her T-shirt up over her mouth and nose.  The

gesture was largely futile; cotton knit had no proven capability for

filtering out noxious gases, but old habits die hard.  The smell of the

smoke triggered a time warp in her brain.  Other than the occasional

whiff from around a campfire or the cab of a vehicle she'd pulled over,

Anna had not breathed marijuana smoke in quantity since college.  The

odor was unmistakable and, for a goodly number of those in her

generation, nostalgic.  It swept her back to the days when the world's

great evils were either unknown or considered combatable; a time when

she was an immortal, invincible and allpowerful in the sublime ignorance

of youth.

From habit long dead and, she'd thought, forgotten, she inhaled the

smoke and held it trapped in her lungs.  In less time than it took to

think it through, Anna realized what she was doing and breathed out.

Jesus Christ, am I out of my fucking mind?  She rubbed her face to clear

it of real and imagined cobwebs.

"It'll go," Hanson said ." We don't want a big fire anyway.  Though I

suppose if it got away it'd cover a lot of sins."

" Now, Mitch," the Mrs.  said reprovingly, and Anna had an almost

unbearable urge to laugh at the absurd domesticity of the scene.

"You know I wouldn't," Mitch defended himself.  Anna bet he would the

moment the apron strings were untied.

The two of them crunched together through the leaves, their feet and

legs visible from the door of Anna's sty.  Resisting the temptation to

hold her breath-and so more smoke in her lungs-she focused on becoming

at one with the spiders and the pig shit.

A couple of yards to her left, the Hansons stopped and repeated the

ignition process on the second burn pile.  Smoke from both sides now;

Anna fought to keep from coughing and giving away her location.  The

next time she had to pee in a bottle for the federal government's

drug-screening lab, she was going to have a lot of explaining to do. The

image struck her as unsupportably funny and she felt the giggles mixing

with the coughs till it seemed she must explode.  At that thought

anxiety, bordering on mindless panic, swept through her so suddenly her

bowels grew watery.

She was getting stoned.

She'd not been high, at least not on dope, since she'd given it up

twenty-one years before.  To fight off the demons, she tried to remember

what she could of those long-gone days.  Much of it was a blur.  She

remembered the silly things: the munchies and the giggles, the lethargy

of sitting in front of an old black-and-white television watching Marcus

Welby reruns.  The memory of the bad acid trip that had forever ended

her drug days forced itself into her mind and for a moment it seemed as

if the precarious walls of her shelter were closing in of their own

accord, flapping slowly like the splintered wings of a wooden butterfly.

Don't go there, she told herself in the words of a current clichd .

The clichd was one she particularly despised and the fact that she had

used it sent another stab of irrational fear through her.

Fires on both sides were catching on well.  The inside of the hog pen

danced with the flames, an orange and black disco light-show without

music.  Anna closed her eyes against it and tried to think, tried not to

breathe, and failed at both.  Flickering red and orange played across

her closed eyelids.  Fight it as she would, she had the sense of

falling-tilting first one way and then another as if she would topple

from her sitting position.  The crackling burned at her brain in a

low-grade fever and her skin crawled with sweat and fear and God knew

what else.

At length the busy noises abated and Anna dared to hope that the Hansons

had gone away and she could do the same.  Opening her eyes required more

courage than she would have thought possible.  Had keeping them closed

not been the greater of the two evils, she doubted she could have

managed it.

Directly in front of her, framed in the angle of rough lumber and

illuminated by the light of the fires, the Hansons sat in folding lawn

chairs.  She in dark blue polyester pants and a sleeveless cotton shell

that exposed too much flabby upper arm, he in faded uniform trousers and

a worn polo shirt, each with a beer in hand: a Norman Rockwell vision of

hell.  Again laughter threatened to tear its way out of Anna's throat

and again it was quelled by a wave of ice-cold fear.

Time ratcheted uncomfortably.

Anna had no idea how long she'd sat in the hovel breathing smoke.  A

minute, an hour, three?  All seemed equally defensible .

Breathing was easier but whether the fires had grown hot enough to draw

the smoke upward or whether the dope was having an anesthetic effect on

her lungs, she wasn't sure.  The impulse to cough had left her and she

made a point of starting a "small blessings" list.

To keep her mind from wandering to less auspicious climes, she forced

herself to concentrate on the Hansons.  From all appearances they were

relaxed, happy even.  If Anna had had to categorize the tone they'd set

for this bizarre evening's entertainment, she would have called it

relief.  The Hansons acted relieved.

How on earth they could be so sanguine about torching their cash crop

mystified her.  Of course, the way things were going, how her head

remained on her shoulders was beginning to mystify her .

The time, effort, and risk that would have gone into farming the plot

had to be considerable, but the sudden expansion to take care of the new

plants and the demands they put on the cultivation didn't strike her as

something to be so lightly-not to mention downright

cheerfully-destroyed.

No answers suggested themselves.  Time drifted.  Anna drifted .

Once, twice, maybe a hundred times-she couldn't recall, nor did it seem

particularly important-one Hanson or the other would abandon the lawn

chair to poke up the fire or get another beer.

More than once, Anna had come gently back to earth having totally

forgotten where she was or why.  Each time, she was called back from the

brink by the reality of the pains that were beginning to take over her

body: aches in her ankles, numbness in her hips, itching on her legs and

arms.  With the unpleasant clarity born of discomfort the why of her

predicament returned and she was reminded not to crawl out of the

sanctity of her hog pen and ilito the lit clearing.  Then more smoke

would be sucked into her brain and, for a while, life would be on hold.

High was not what it used to be, she thought in a moment between the

drifts.  Too much paranoia had been added to the mix: fear of the

consequences, of the years, but mostly of her own mind .

In her twenties she'd trusted it to guide her, answer her questions,

make the right choices.  Somewhere in her thirties she'd lost faith .

She saw her mind now as a moderately useful, if highly overrated, organ,

one susceptible to chemical storms, hormonal droughts, and the phases of

the moon.  Gone were the days when she could alter her reality with

impunity.  Being stoned had become less a matter of flying than of

hanging on to some ragged edge of sanity and waiting for the smoke to

clear.

The last thing she remembered was a sudden flare of light and Mitch

Hanson's voice crackling through the saw of the flames: "Well, there

goes the last of Ellen's college tuition."

"She saved her daddy's life.  That should be worth at least a year with

the Seven Sisters."

"Orinsing-" and an echo.

OLLY "AD REFUSED to Cry.  She'd sat across the table in the Mpub, arm's

length from Frederick, her nerves so tight he could almost hear them

hum.  the face he'd come to think of as exquisite-a word he customarily

reserved for sculpture and fine porcelain-was closed to him.  Pain was

written clearly in the too-wide eyes and the controlled line of her

lips, but he was not invited to solace her.

Over a Scotch she did not drink, she told him the baby killer the

headlines had shouted about was the man on whose behalf she'd testified

several years previously; the last time she'd ever been lured to the

witness stand.  Her testimony, along with the obfuscatory powers of the

defense attorney and the slow wits of the prosecutor, had gotten the man

a light sentence on an insanity plea.  He'd served just over three

years.  Two weeks after he was paroled he had sexually assaulted and

killed the three-year-old boy the tourists from Ely, Nevada, had

discovered in the shopping bag.

The psychiatrist was walking the thin line between guilt and

responsibility.  The subject cut too close to the bone for her to share

it in detail with a stranger, she'd said, and Frederick had been stung .

He temporarily put aside his bizarre courtship of Anna's sister.  To

give Molly back some semblance of control, he steered the conversation

toward the concrete: suspects, clues, the possible connection to the

threats she'd received.

Despite the emotional pressure Molly was under, she hadn't come

unprepared.  just once, Frederick wished she would.  Then you could

fancy it a tryst, he mocked himself; still, it would have pleased him.

As it was, she pulled out her black briefcase.  Her secretary had spent

the morning in research.  Lester Mack, the man arrested for the murder

of the boy, and the man whom Dr.  Pigeon had been instrumental in saving